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hypergamous women

At the end of September last year I gave two talks at the 10th annual 21 Convention in Orlando, Florida. This probably isn’t news to any of my regular readers as it was the only in-person appearance I did last year. My first talk was a familiar one – Hypergamy; Micro to Macro – and was an updated version of the talk I delivered at the Man in Demand Conference in 2015. I’m happy to announce that the video of this dissertation is almost ready to go live on the 21 University site. I should also mention that this video marks the first time I’ve put my real face out in the wild so be gentle.

Before this video is made public I wanted to address some of the more common (and often deliberate) misconceptions about Hypergamy I read floating around Twitter, more than a few Red Pill forums and the blogs of Purple Pill ‘life coaches’ who need to dismiss Hypergamy as a ‘thing’ in order to keep their clientele mired in Blue Pill Disney dreams coming true. Some of these are honest mistakes, and some are just the opinions of guys who only see one side of the Hypergamous equation. A lot of critics think Hypergamy is all there is to Red Pill awareness, and while it’s true that women’s sexual strategies extrapolate a great deal into our social order, there’s a lot more to understanding intersexual dynamics than just wrapping your head around Hypergamy.

I’ve written about Hypergamy for as long as this blog’s existed (I own the google search term) and as new readers become initiated in the Red Pill I can’t expect them to have read every essay describing the ins and outs of Hypergamy. So in the interests of clearing the air and consolidating all of these misunderstandings for everyone benefit – and to refute the disingenuous – I’m going to run down the most common Hypergamous hate I see here.

Hypergamy is a Straightjacket
This is easily the most common misperception I read. Hypergamy is an evolved social dynamic. That is to say it is the behavioral extension of biological factors; most notably Ovulatory Shift. I’ll delve into this in the 21 Convention talk, and I’ve covered this in Your Friend Menstruation, but Hypergamy is a sexual strategy exclusive to women. It is the behavioral manifestation complementary to women’s hormonal and biological realities. Hypergamy at its root level is about the most efficacious, pragmatic, means of women becoming fertile with the best genetic breeding opportunities, and simultaneously pairing in the long term provisioning opportunities available to a woman.

To a strictly deductive, analytical mindset Hypergamy seems a lot like a straightjacket. If you measure up, you’re golden. If you don’t, you’re fucked. This reflex is a binary either / or extreme and as such it paints Hypergamy as something insurmountable and very deterministic. I will admit, I’ve read some Red Pill guys either triumphantly or defeatedly cop to this idea about Hypergamy. What both fail to consider is women’s individual capacity to optimize Hypergamy in relative contrast to their own SMV. I’ve seen low SMV Pickup Artists pull off what to this mindset should be impossible. There is so much more to Hypergamy than just what a man’s looks presents. There are factors and circumstances that can circumvent Hypergamy, and there is nothing deterministic about it. Yes, Hypergamy is often ruthless, but resigning oneself to binary extremes about it gets men nowhere.

Hypergamy is only defined as “marrying upward”This is a pedantic dismissal of a phenomenon based on semantics. Yes, the original term was developed to describe women’s “tendency to marry upwardly into higher socioeconomic strata” by sociologists, but the term deserves a much broader definition in light of the biological and psychological realities we observe in women today. We could create some new term that would describe the phenomenon, but Hypergamy would describe it in the abstract just as well. Critics resorting to this dismissal only seek to discredit the one proposing an idea based on terminology.

Some women are more Hypergamous than othersThis is usually trotted out by the ‘not all women are like that‘ critics, and a lot of these are, of course, women. But there are also the ‘Quality Woman‘ seekers who want to believe that their unicorn woman wouldn’t be as Hypergamous as most slutty skanks on a constant lookout for the bigger and better deal. Hypergamy in this case takes on a aspect of social conditioning and becomes a part of women’s personality.

While it is true that acculturation and learned social practices can be a buffer against Hypergamous excesses in women, it doesn’t lessen or dissolve Hypergamy’s influence in women. Just as men’s sexuality is learned to be reigned in, so too can Hypergamy be learned to be controlled. Needless to say in our post-sexual revolution era Fempowerment has effectively unfettered that buffer for women. Learning Hypergamous restraint is viewed as some male chauvinistic repression of women’s sexuality, but the truth is we are expecting women to self-police their own Hypergamy (with no real instruction). We hope that women will effectively select against their Hypergamous best interest in exercising that control, and today men pay the price for that foolishness.

All women are Hypergamous. Some have learned to curb its excesses, some live in a cultural environment that moderates it for them, but all women are Hypergamous to the same biologically inspired degree. All that changes is the context in which Hypergamy is expressed in women.

Both men and women are Hypergamous
I covered this fallacy in False Equivalencies, but to recap it briefly, Hypergamy is a sexual strategy unique to women. Women have attraction floors for men with whom they will breed and/or settle into pair bonding with. Women only consider an equal to, or better than, arrangement with regard to sexual market value of a man in contrast to (what they perceive as) their own. Men will date and have sex with women who are sometimes 2 to 3 steps below their own SMV. Hypergamy never seeks its own level; women seek an advantage in the mating game, men simply want to reproduce. This is what defines each sex’s imperatives.

Men and women are different in various facets. It is the equalist mindset that presupposes we are the same (or more alike than different) and because of this the False Equivalency argument is always the go-to response to Hypergamy in women. The equalist believes that if women are Hypergamous then men, being equals, must also be as well. Really, this is a retort intended to refocus an unflattering truth about women onto men to even the scales and make men’s pointing out Hypergamy an equal shame. This false equivalency is also used for many other unflattering truths unique to women, so don’t be fooled.

Hypergamy is overemphasized in the manosphere
I see this more and more because as women openly embrace Hypergamy in a public sphere this leads to men becoming more sensitive to their (often ugly) roles in that strategy. There’s a real want to mitigate the importance Hypergamy plays in men’s lives because most men don’t like the idea of being controlled. Which then goes back to the straightjacket notion. Men accept Hypergamy, but they refuse to see it’s larger influence on social and political dynamics. I wrote about this in The Political is Personal. It’s almost impossible not to be accused of being conspiratorial, but in a feminine-primary, gynocentric social order it is women’s interests that define what is ‘correct’ discourse.

We read all the time about how western (millennial) society has become overly PC (politically correct), but I would argue that we are overly female correct. When women are afforded unchecked power their first imperative is controlling men to accommodate the Feminine Imperative. Women’s Hypergamous interests influence and dictate legislation and political discourse. It may not be something most men want to consider. Most guys in the sphere are only focusing on women they know personally, but there is a larger social narrative that is inspired by women optimizing Hypergamy.

Hypergamy only applies to men with the best social / provisioning status
I’ve seen this one-sided perspective promoted by Dr. Jordan Peterson. The idea is that, in women’s natural beneficence, they will only be attracted to the man with the best capacity to provide for her long term security and parental investment. This idea myopically ignores the Alpha Fucks side of the Hypergamous equation. This concept is very complimentary to women and usually guys who limit their definition of Hypergamy to the inherent goodness of women also tend to think of Alpha in terms of men being pro-social, leaders of business and community. This is false on many levels, but it’s very virtue-satisfying for men who believe that they’ll eventually be rewarded by women (quality women of course) who will after time think “nothing’s sexier”. I should also say that this fallacy is very popular for Betas in Waiting.

It’s men who are responsible for Hypergamy
This is a reversal of the origins of Hypergamy, but from a socially constructed perspective. I see a lot of well meaning Red Pill moralist men trot this out as a complement to (again) their hope that women might ever find their virtuousness at all attractive. This fallacy presupposes that men are the real power distributors and the nebulous Patriarchy women complain of is something a majority of men are in someway in control of. It also reverses the origins of male dominance hierarchies. It presumes those hierarchies exist separate from the women who actually perpetuate them with their own Hypergamy and upward sexual selection.

This appeals to men who’ve bought into the ‘Man Up for the Red Pill’ ideology. Women are only as Hypergamous as men allow them to be. While there’s some truth in that in certain cultural contexts, it is women who are deciding for themselves how Hypergamous they wish to be today, and they’ve got the full force of the law and social norms to enforce their choices. While I’m all for men establishing a dominant frame that women naturally want from men, I think it’s unnecessarily self-defeating to believe that women don’t understand how their own sexual strategy works and are responsible for it.

Hypergamy means only 20% of men will ever get laid
Newsflash: Beta men can and do get laid. This is one concern that a lot of critics think is promoting self-defeat in men newly exposed to Red Pill awareness. The concern is that, again, men will become despondent because they’ll classify themselves as one of the 80% of guys who don’t get laid or women would rather not sleep with, because Hypergamy. This theme is actually carried over to a lot of these misconceptions; PUAs and Purple Pill ‘coaches’ alike are concerned that their clients will just give up and go MGTOW because that Rollo guy showed them the ugliest side of Hypergamy and they’re hopeless.

First off, nothing could be further from the truth. Second, this fallacy stupidly (binarily) ignores the individual circumstances of women at the various stages of life. Not all women can get with that guy in the 20th percentile for any number of reasons. Thirdly, the primary edict of this blog and the Red Pill in general is using this information to better a man’s life on a by-man basis. If anything, being exposed to Red Pill truths like Hypergamy should embolden men to become more than they are in a new paradigm based on Red Pill truth rather than Blue Pill false hope – hope that, unfortunately, a lot of Purple Pill coaches are selling.

Hypergamy requires trust on the part of women
No, it really doesn’t. What this premise ignores is the dual nature of Hypergamy, and trust has nothing to do with the sexual urgency a woman feels for a guy who represents a 2-3 level bump in SMV compared to her own while she’s in the proliferative phase of her menstrual cycle. Trust, rapport and comfort are post-orgasm feelings. These are reserved for the Beta Provisioning side of Hypergamy and ones women usually associate with their luteal phase of menstruation. This is why the Betas women trust are the first guys they call to cry to about the guy they fucked who had no trust prerequisite. This fallacy is just stupid, but it does illustrate the Hypergamous process from both sides.

Men should stay ignorant of Hypergamy for their own good
This again goes back to the idea that men (usually Blue Pill Beta men) who know too much about the visceral aspects of Hypergamy will naturally become despondent and go MGTOW or worse, kill themselves in the thinking that they’ll never measure up. If you’re at all familiar with my writing you’ll know that I think the only good is knowledge and the only evil is ignorance. As I’ve said many times, the truth will set you free, but it doesn’t make it pretty. It also doesn’t absolve a man of the responsibility that comes along with that truth. I get that guys are hopeful that they can find a magic formula that’ll get them their dream girlswithout much effort. Telling them that’s not gonna work for them makes them hopeless because they still cling to Blue Pill ideals being resolved with Red Pill truths.

This is where guys get the notion of ‘leagues‘ and that they don’t qualify for certain women because they’re out of their league. As I stated earlier a lot of the “keep the guys in the dark” notion is really a misguided way of supposedly helping a guy become something more by keeping him ignorant.

Hypergamy give women an “out” for bad, evil treatment of men
This is a play on the personal responsibility trope. I covered this in Our Sisters’ Keeper. It really comes down to the capacity men believe women have or don’t have with regard to their personal agency. This returns us to the question of women’s Hypoagency:

Hypoagency – the idea that certain individuals (e.g. women) lack agency in their own actions.They lack control. They are not actors … rather, they are acted upon. The corollary to that argument being that they are not responsible for their own actions. Yet the cultural narrative of the omni-empowered, Strong Independent Woman® is completely at odds with exactly women’s hypoagency with regard to rape. They are powerful and purposeful when it serves and entirely unaccountable and blameless when it’s not convenient.

There was a time when the book The Selfish Gene was being bandied around the manosphere and the concern was men might use the premises of the selfish gene to absolve them of cheating on their girlfriends or used as an excuse to pursue one woman after the other. They couldn’t help it, it was written into their DNA. The same argument is now used by (mainly moralist) men who promote the reverse of the idea that men are responsible for Hypergamy. Thus, women being acted upon by a Hypergamy that’s written into their DNA can use it as an excuse for the worst behavior and ugliest results imaginable to men. The logic then follows that women are either active agents and have moral agency or they lack that agency and need men to provide the self-control women are incapable of.

Personally, I believe its a combination of the two; women do have agency for which they should be responsible and accountable for, but also, men need to provide a confident dominant frame under which women want to submit and be associated with. It is not men’s fault that women are Hypergamous, but if there is to be a healthy control of it for the best interests of both men and women, men must understand it and master it. I would say the same of men’s own sexuality and sexual expression – however, we are already overwhelmingly held accountable for not mastering it.

Women aren’t slaves to Hypergamy
This is one more question of women’s agency. Just as hypoagency and the biological element of Hypergamy can be used to socially absolve women of the responsibilities of it, so too can women’s awareness of their own Hypergamy be another way to excuse bad behavior. Again, it’s about personal responsibility. I’ve never stated that women are “slaves” to Hypergamy. I have explored women’s conscious awareness of their behaviors being influenced by their innate Hypergamy. Most women don’t realize they are giving a guy a shit test, it’s part of their limbic subroutines. Most women don’t consciously plan their girls’ night out around the proliferative phase of their menstrual cycle. They largely do, but they don’t realize the coordination. Women aren’t slaves to Hypergamy, but they aren’t immune to its subconscious influence, and this applies to your “good girl”, your trad-con “Red Pill” woman and your “Quality Woman”.

Women are Hypergamous, men are hypogamous
Here we have another attempt to confirm a false equivalency in the hopes that some egalitarian balance might be found between men and women. I’ve heard Purple Pill men trot this one out occasionally: Hypogamy is the idea that men must marry down, or the increasing tendency for women to marry down in the face of men’s socioeconomic status being less than that of women’s. The salient point is that there is no biological element in men that would suggest anything about men opting for hypogamy. This is simply another effort to balance Hypergamy for an egalitarian mindset. I’m not suggesting hypogamy isn’t a thing, just that it’s a sociological phenomenon. Mens biological imperative is unlimited access to unlimited sexuality, and this we can see manifested in their own behavior. Men don’t seek out hypogamous circumstances as a point of their imperative. Sometimes that may be the result, but again this is an extrinsic circumstance not an evolved drive.

Hypergamy should end after marriage
Oh man, wouldn’t that be nice? Actually no, it would put men and women into a state of personal stagnation. While I try never to deal in “should be” I do recognize that there are still guys who still believe that all the anxiety they felt in their dating years should fade to unconditional comfort after they get married. This is false for many reasons, but then there is the extreme reversal of this; “Aww man if I’m not the highest apex Alpha in my wife’s world she’ll cheat on me with him as soon as her proliferative phase comes around.”

Some critics like to overplay this stupid binary to prove that “women are people too” and Hypergamy isn’t even a thing for them once they’ve settled in with a great guy like you. Hypergamy is alway in effect for women by order of degree; marriage is no insulation from the sexual market place, you fool yourself in ever getting comfortable (or vulnerable). Guys who buy into this fallacy are usually equalists who believe their Burden of Performance ended when they said “I do”.

Now, that said, it’s not all gloom and doom. If you’ve established a strong dominant frame prior to marriage Hypergamy actually works in your favor. The same studies that showed women in unsatisfying LTRs or marriages sought out extra-pair sex with more masculine men also showed that women in satisfying relationships were more sexually proceptive (horny) for the men they were paired with when in their prime ovulatory phase.

Hypergamy is only about Alpha Fucks
Another type of critic likes to overplay the importance of looks and Alpha dominance in the Hypergamous equation. I’m of the opinion that looks and confident dominance (bordering on cocky arrogance) stimulates tingles in the most natural visceral way, but that’s not the entirety of the Hypergamous equation. As most PUAs will belabor, looks without congruence in behavior can actually be anti-seductive. Looks will cover a multitude of Game sins, but Game and generating an emotional impact in a woman is always the keystone. There are two sides to Hypergamy, Alpha Fucks and Beta Bucks. In today’s world women’s primary focus is on the Alpha Fucks side of the equation, but it doesn’t mean the Beta Bucks provisioning side has been erased.

Hypergamy isn’t so important, you’re overstating things
I get this from Purple Pill guys, PUAs and women – guys who obsess over Hypergamy are reactionary losers. And to them I’ll once again point out the story of Daniella Greene, the FBI translator who left her military husband to marry the very ISIS fighter she’d been tasked to investigate. Watch the video at this link and then think about how many Red Pill truths this story confirms. Think about the far greater scope and importance an understanding of Red Pill intersexual dynamics and how Hypergamy factors into what was an international incident that threatened national security. Are we just going to say “well, bitches be crazy, she must be damaged” or do we see the mechanics behind her actions with a Red Pill Lens? This is only one example of the scope of the importance a developed Red Pill awareness should mean to men.

Look at the significance to which Hypergamy influences everything from divorce laws to child custody to even abortion. Hypergamy is a much larger dynamic than most men really want to digest. It’s not being reactionary to see the forest for the trees here.

You pronounce Hyper-gamee wrong, thus you are uneducated and your information is flawed.Ok, you got me, disregard everything on this blog then.

In Monday’s post comments there was a lot of back and forth, but in the latter pages there was an interesting exchange I thought might make for an interesting weekend discussion. Commenter Kryptokate resurrected an old feminine social convention I recently covered in Validation Hunting & The Jenny Bahn Epiphany. The premise of this convention is that men seek out, and motivate themselves towards highly attractive women because they enjoy the validation or affirmation they receive from their male peers when they’re seen paired with an HB9 high SMV woman on his arm.

The “arm candy” trope is a useful convention for women in that it assuages her bruised ego and competition anxiety by converting a man’s natural desire for a high SMV woman into a perceived insecurity of his (really all men by association).

Kryprokate:

I’m sticking with my assertion that lots of guys love to show off a hot woman to other guys to gain their respect and increase their status. I’m not saying ALL guys want to do this and maybe you don’t, but lots of them do. I don’t want to “show off” a guy either — I’m an introverted homebody and don’t want a guy for anything but to stay home with, talk, have sex, watch movies, etc. But lots of men love to show off to their peers just like lots (probably most) women do.

Johnnycomelately:

Men don’t seek validation through females, men desire females objectively, tits are tits, don’t matter what the guys thinks. You think men watch porn to get validation?

Women desire to be desired, the process is completely about validation.

Problem with female desire to be desired is that it is not a very high bar to pass, I find it humorous that women brag-splain about getting sex from men.

“Heck, give me ten minutes to download an app and I could get a man to have sex with me in 30 minutes. Nothing to write home about.”

And from the Validation Hunting post:

The idea that men “seek validation” for their earned status or to ‘right’ past wrongs to their egos while they were working their way to that status is a social convention. The Feminine Imperative relies on memes and conventions which shift the ownership of women’s personal liabilities for their sexual strategy to men.

When men are blamed for the negative consequences of women’s sexual strategy it helps to blunt the painful truths that Jenny Bahn is (to her credit) honestly confronting in her article at 30 years old and the SMV balance shifts towards enabling men’s capacity to effect their own sexual strategy.

One of the unique aspects of the Feminine Imperative is its fluid ability to craft social conventions that obscure the worst misgivings of women’s dualistic sexual strategy (Hypergamy) and redirect the liability for them squarely on men’s shoulders. I covered many of these conventions in Operative Social Conventions, but chief among them is the utility of shame.

Shaming features in a majority of feminine social conventions used against men because women are conditioned to fear social ostracization as part of their same-sex peer socialization. Little girls punish each other by ‘not-being-friends-with’ another girl in their peer clutch. Using shame is a skill women learn early in life to effect the ends of their developing solipsism.

If men can be shamed into believing that their natural predisposition toward sexually desiring high SMV, physically ideal specimens of women is due to an insecurity with their personal status the effect would be one of leveling the SMP playing field. “Men only want hot women to feed their egos and impress other men” translates into shaming men (the more desirable men who can merit the attention of a high SMV woman) for being insecure with the perceptions of other men.

This carefully removes any negative association with women’s competitiveness for higher tier men, convinces women themselves that “men are just like that” to Buffer against rejection, and puts the burden of that competition on the man in the hopes that he’ll pair with a woman who is of lower SMV for fear of being shamed about his “insecurity” of wanting other men to see his status as higher than it should be.

Thus, the optimized ends of Hypergamy – a woman pairing with an SMV superior man – are better effected by a social convention.

I should also add that this social convention dovetails with another useful convention that relies on a similar dynamic – that of women complaining men sexually objectify women. The simple truth is that it’s part of men’s neurological firmware to see women’s bodies as objects. It’s a well studied fact that when men see an arousing woman’s semi-nude body it triggers the same area of our brains associated with tool use. Sexual objectification is a feature for men, not a bug.

I’ve gotten into this debate on other forums and comment threads, but it bears repeating. My N-count is a bit more than 40 women, and of those women never did I make an approach (or go along with a woman opening me) with a forethought of wanting to impress my male friends. In fact there were some women I got with I’d rather my friends at the time knew nothing about.

The debate usually spins from there about how men just “do it unconsciously”. That’s an easy fallback, but I’d argue that the limbic and visceral incentive of wanting to sexually experience a smoking hot HB9.5 supersedes any subconscious thought of how good a guy will look when he shows her off to his buddies. I’ve been with strippers, a girl who was in Playboy in the 90’s, and several other women most guys just fantasize about – half the reason I stayed with the BPD girlfriend for so long was because she was just so fucking hot – but not once did I have any thought of brandishing any of them to improve my status with my peers. In fact I preferred we just get after it at her or my place than make any conscious effort on my part to show her off.

This’ll sound facetious, but I’ve never thought of sex as being “validating” or ego-affirming. I honestly think a lot of that expectation comes from a feminized conditioning about “how sex should be” for men. I was, and still kind of am, more into sex as experience. It’s always been something fun to enjoy with a woman for me, not some meaningful act of cosmic significance. I’ve had sex with women I loved and women I didn’t, some were memorable, some were…meh. Even in my bluest of blue pill days my ‘validation’ came from other sources, not sex.

So the question for the weekend is this, as a man, do you give any headspace at all to considering how your status might improve with other men if you’re seen with a hot woman?

When you see a guy who’s physically an obvious 1-2 SMV degrees lower than the woman he’s with, do you think any better of him or do you presume the imbalance is due to some other external factor (such as wealth or fame)?

Do you see the method behind the madness of shaming-down apex Men in order to better optimize Hypergamy for “lesser” SMV women?